Tag Archives: journalism history

Two important trend lines have recently crossed, probably forever. The number of jobs in the U.S. newspaper sector has now dipped below the number of jobs in the digital media. Newspapers are not dead, but they are no longer the center of gravity for the news business. Thus ends a dominance that began in the 17th century and reached a peak in the 20th century before cratering in the 21st century.

That is one of the major findings in a new study from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, documenting what many have long noticed: American newspapers are no longer the driving wheel of American journalism. The past belonged to the printing press, but the future belongs to the web.

Here’s the big picture:

Here are some highlights:

–The purple line that starts so far above the others in 1990 represents all employment in the newspaper industry. It’s worth noting that the BLS counts everyone who works at a newspaper, not just the newsroom crew. So, this is just a rough approximation of the employment situation of journalists — reporters, photographers, videographers, podcasters, editors, producers, and others who are directly involved in gathering and disseminating news. That is a much harder number to track.

–Newspaper employment took a hit in the early 1990s, then sort of plateaued, took a steeper hit when the “tech bubble” burst in 2001 (taking with it a lot of full-page ads), and then really dove in the Great Recession of 2008-9. Since then, the downward trend has slowed a bit, but the trend from 2009 to 2016 gives no reason to think that newspapers are coming back.

–The BLS also provides a helpful monthly chart of the data used to draw all those lines. Here are some salient details I found in the data tables.

–Looking deeper into the numbers, it is heartening to see that the overall numbers of jobs in all these industries combined has not dropped very much, having fallen about 3 percent over 26 years. The biggest proportional hit seems to have occurred in “books” — which I take to mean the publishing industry as a whole. While a small number of journalists make a living by writing non-fiction books, it is probably a very small group that depends primarily on their book royalties.

–The big gainer is “Internet publishing and broadcasting.” It’s hard to imagine how 28,800 people made a living putting stuff online in 1990 (which was before the Web became ubiquitous), but there is no mistaking that web-based activities have been on a surge.

–The other big gainer in the last quarter century has been “Motion picture and video production.” It is unclear from the BLS definitions of its categories what fraction of all those folks could be considered journalists. Probably a lot of them work in Hollywood or other venues where they produce content that is fictional or promotional. Still, it is a rough indicator of where the growth is.

One question that these data raise is this: what will journalists of the future need to know and do?

About a decade ago, my colleagues and I began a deep re-think of our curriculum to bring it out of the days of print newspapers, glossy magazines, film-based photography, and broadcast television. We eliminated our separate, medium-based “concentrations” and decided that all our students should be educated as digital journalists. We tore out our darkrooms, converted to all-digital photography, and decided that all our students need to be competent in “visual journalism.” We ramped up our instruction in shooting and editing video. We converted our student radio station to digital and embraced podcasting. We decided that essentially all our coursework should be multimedia. Like other journalism programs in U.S. universities, we found that it was not easy, but it was a matter of survival.

As a specialist in the history of journalism, I spend a lot of time thinking about the centuries when the newspaper ruled the field. The newspaper had a good long run, but it is clearer every year that newspapers not only documented history, they are history.

In his recent remarks, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump issued a thinly veiled threat to the news media: if he’s elected, he will (somehow) change the country’s libel laws to make it easier for him and others to sue the news media. It’s an issue with a history that is worth remembering.

Here’s Trump (from CNN):

“One of the things I’m going to do if I win… I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money,” Trump said during a rally in Fort Worth, Texas.

“We’re going to open up those libel laws so when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” he said. “We’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.”

Trump in Fort Worth (Getty)

Trump, who has lost a libel suit in the past, took his usual menacing tone and framed the issue as a conflict between himself and the media. The party that is missing from that formulation is the American people, who are the real clients of the First Amendment. That is the amendment that says, in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”

And that press freedom extends into the realm of libel, as I explained in my history of this country’s journalism, Covering America. Trump is not the first public figure to try to use the libel laws as a backdoor way to achieve the ultimate goal of intimidating and controlling the news media. Here’s an excerpt from Covering America:

One of the greatest potential threats to the national coverage of the South arose in 1960 in Montgomery, Alabama. The means of intimidation was not the usual one—violence or the threat of it—but the legal system itself. At risk was the ability of the news media even to cover the movement in an honest, independent way.

The threat first arose in April 1960 as an unintended consequence of a decision by a group of civil rights activists to place a full-page advertisement in the New York Times decrying the “unprecedented wave of terror” being imposed on the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and student activists. The ad stated: “Again and again, the Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s peaceful protests with intimidation and violence. . . . They have bombed his home almost killing his wife and child. They have assaulted his person.” For good measure, the ad charged “grave misconduct” on the part of Montgomery officials as a group.

The city’s police commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, was incensed and decided to sue the Times for libel. (It didn’t matter that the offending passages were in the form of an advertisement and not a news story produced by a Times journalist; under U.S. law, a publisher is equally responsible for all content. It also didn’t matter that Sullivan was not singled out by name in the ad; under U.S. law, if an individual can reasonably be identified, that is enough.) Sullivan sued for $500,000 in an Alabama state court, charging the Times with publishing damaging falsehoods about him. The threat was clear: if Sullivan won, no paper could afford to cover the civil rights movement. “Silence, not money, was the goal,” as one recent history puts it.

For the Times’ Southern correspondent, Claude Sitton, the suit meant that he had better hightail it out of Alabama to avoid being subpoenaed, so he headed straight for the Georgia line, leaving Alabama essentially uncovered for the next two and a half years. For the paper’s lawyers, however, fleeing to another state was not an option, though they tried. It was difficult even to find a lawyer in Alabama who would agree to represent the Times. When one was finally found, the lawyers decided that their only recourse was to argue that the suit did not belong in an Alabama court, since the paper did hardly any business in the state. The jurisdictional argument didn’t work. The paper lost in the circuit court in Montgomery (where the judge criticized “racial agitators” and praised “white man’s justice”), and Sullivan was awarded the full $500,000—the largest libel judgment in that state’s history. The Times appealed, only to lose again. Further appeals did not look promising, since the U.S. Supreme Court had held that journalists had no constitutional protections against libel claims. So far, the use of the courts to silence the press was working.

The passage through all those courts took years, but the Times did not give up. Whatever the publisher and editors thought about civil rights, they were professionally committed to upholding ournalistic principles and prerogatives. The final appeal was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court on January 6, 1964. The stakes were high. “The court would decide nothing less than how free the press really could be,” one observer has noted. “If the decision went against the Times,would reporters be vulnerable to every libel claim filed by a ticked-off sheriff?”

And it wasn’t just the Times that was at risk. All told, Southern officials had filed some seventeen libel suits against various news media, seeking damages that could total more than $288 million. If they succeeded, the cost of covering race in the South would be so prohibitive that even the wealthiest national news media would have to pack up and go home.

On March 9, 1964, the Court issued its unanimous ruling in the Sullivan case—in favor of the Times. The ruling, a milestone in expanding press freedom, rewrote many of the rules under which journalism has been practiced ever since. The key finding was that the law of libel had to yield to the First Amendment. The Court held that if the award to Sullivan were allowed to stand, the result would amount to a form of government censorship of the press, tantamount to a de facto Sedition Act, forcing every journalist to prove the truth of every statement, which would in turn lead to self-censorship. Instead, the high court said that “debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

To make sure that journalists had the breathing room they need to report on and editorialize about the performance of public officials, the Court determined that libel should not be used to trump press freedom. Public figures like Sullivan, who voluntarily enter the public arena by seeking office, must expect to take some criticism. Henceforth it would not be enough for a public official who wanted to win a libel suit just to prove that the published material was false and defamatory. Plaintiffs would have to meet a higher burden of proof, which the Court defined as “actual malice,” a legal term meaning that the material in dispute was published with the knowledge that it was false or with “reckless disregard” for the truth.

Either way, public figures would have a much harder time winning such suits. The Times—and the rest of the media—were free to go back to Alabama and wherever else the civil rights story took them. . .

For more on these issues, see the classic work by NYT journalist Tony Lewis, Make No Law. There is also a very worthwhile discussion in The Race Beat, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff.

This weekend marked the general release of the terrific new film “Spotlight,” about the team of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe who broke the prize-winning story about the widespread abuse of children by Catholic priests. The film, as I noted in my review, is a much-needed valentine to traditional news media, praising their willingness to use their resources in pursuit of telling the truth and holding the powerful accountable.

“Spotlight” is already being hailed (to use a bit of journalese) as one of the best films of all time about journalism. Which raises the question:

What are the best films about journalism?

Here’s my annotated list:

[I like all of these films, for one reason or another, so I am not ranking them. Instead, they are arranged chronologically, which makes some interesting points about the evolving view of journalists over time. I had never noticed how many of these come in clusters, which must be a lagging indicator of something.]

I COVER THE WATERFRONT (1933)

Claudette Colbert plays a smuggler’s daughter who is being investigated by a reporter, played by Ben Lyon. Complications naturally ensue. Fun fact: The title song was recorded by Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra and others.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Dir. Howard Hawks. My personal favorite. Watch Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell at the top of their games in a romp through Chicago journalism of the 1920s. HGF features an epically dense screenplay, as the two leads constantly talk over each other. One memorable zinger after another. From the play, “The Front Page,” written by journalists Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT (1940)

Dir: Alfred Hitchcock. Joel McCrea plays a young American reporter in London on the eve of WWII, trying to expose enemy agents (as all good journalists just naturally do!). Ben Hecht is one of the writers, though uncredited.

CITIZEN KANE (1941)

The cinematic masterpiece from Orson Welles, who wrote, directed and starred. It’s a thinly veiled biography of William Randolph Hearst, who hated it and did all he could (which was a lot) to try to suppress it. Welles gets the last laugh. Screenplay co-credit goes to Herman J. Mankiewicz.

WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942)

The first of the nine Hepburn/Tracy films. Two rival reporters meet cute and marry not-so-cute. Kate Hepburn plays a version of the real-life columnist Dorothy Thompson. Spencer Tracy wishes his globe-trotting, multi-lingual wife were home a bit more often. Ring Lardner Jr. shares screenwriting credit.

GENTLEMAN’S AGREEMENT (1947)

Gregory Peck plays a journalist who decides to investigate anti-semitism by pretending to be Jewish himself. Peck at his righteous best. Screenplay by Moss Hart, based on novel by Laura Z. Hobson.

CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948)

Jimmy Stewart, who knew his way around a fedora, plays a Chicago reporter who re-opens a cold murder case in this film-noir drama.

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS (1957)

Burt Lancaster, depicts gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Tony Curtis, plays an oily, sycophantic p.r. agent. A noir masterpiece that explores the careers of people who don’t know how not to manipulate others. One of the screenwriting credits goes to playwright Clifford Odets.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976)

The essential celebration of investigative reporting, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The film dramatizes the real-life reporting of the Washington Post reporters that led to the downfall of President Nixon. Screenwriter William Goldman wrote the best line, uttered by Hal Holbrook, playing “Deep Throat” in a dark and empty parking garage: “Follow the money.”

NETWORK (1976)

Dir: Sidney Lumet. Starring: Faye Dunaway and William Holden. Featuring Peter Finch for his memorable freak-out live on television, urging viewers to join him in ranting: “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Writer: Paddy Chayefsky

THE CHINA SYNDROME (1979)

Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, and a bearded Michael Douglas star in this drama about white-hat journalists exposing safety problems at a nuclear power plant. Very much in the shadow of the Three Mile Island incident of the same year.

ABSENCE OF MALICE (1981)

Dir. Sydney Pollack. Sally Field plays a young reporter who libels Paul Newman (horrors) by publishing leaked information about him that is false and harmful to his reputation. This one causes a lot of journalists to squirm.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1982)

Dir. Peter Weir. Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver. Australian reporter, assisted by Linda Hunt, covers Indonesia during a period of turmoil and finds time to romance Sigourney Weaver. Could be Gibson’s career high.

Dir. James L. Brooks. A romantic triangle involving William Hurt, Albert Brooks, and their boss, the incomparable Holly Hunter. Set in a television newsroom, the main characters manage to address real journalistic issues without preachy speeches. Written by James L. Brooks, no relation to Albert. (who also wrote the newsroom-based TV shows Mary Tyler Moore and Lou Grant).

THE PAPER (1994)

Dir: Ron Howard (formerly Opie on Mayberry). Michael Keaton plays Henry Hackett, the city editor of a NYC tabloid, in a day-in-the-life about a journalist’s crusade for the truth at any cost: major fight with wife, lost job at the New York Times, etc. Highlight: the knock-down brawl with Glenn Close.

WAG THE DOG (1997)

Dir. Barry Levinson. An acidic satire of Washington’s manipulation of the mass media. Starring Robert DeNiro as a political operative who enlists a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) to gin up a photogenic war to divert public attention from scandal. Hoffman envisions was as “a pageant.” From the book by Larry Beinhart.

FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS (1998)

Dir.: Terry Gilliam.

Benicio del Toro plays Dr. Gonzo himself. In a masterpiece of understatement, IMDb tries to gets its arms around this film this way: “An oddball journalist and his psychopathic lawyer travel to Las Vegas for a series of psychedelic escapades.” That about sums it up. From the book by HST.

THE INSIDER (1999)

Starring Russell Crowe and Al Pacino. Based on CBS investigation into Big Tobacco. Crowe plays a chemist-turned-whistleblower, and Pacino plays TV producer Lowell Bergman as a blow-hard. Christopher Plummer portrays a TV reporter based on Mike Wallace of CBS’s “60 Minutes” – who did not appreciate the insinuation that he pulled punches. Based on Marie Brenner’s article in Vanity Fair called “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”

ALMOST FAMOUS (2000)

Writer/director Cameron Crowe wonders what it would have been like to be a teenager who gets to write a story for Rolling Stone that involves traveling with a rock band on tour. Starring Kate Hudson as the allusive groupie Penny Lane.

SHATTERED GLASS (2003)

The sad, miserable story of some guy (I don’t want to even use his name) who bamboozled his editors at The New Republic for an unforgivably long time. The guy’s story pitches were too good to be true, alas. Partial writing credit: journalist Buzz Bissinger.

CAPOTE (2005)

In one of his last major roles, Philip Seymour Hoffman does a star turn as the writer Truman Capote as he undertakes the reporting that turned into the non-fiction novel “In Cold Blood.” Catherine Keener plays the young Nelle Harper, Capote’s sidekick and better known as the author Harper Lee of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK (2005)

Dir. George Clooney. David Straithairn plays Edward R. Murrow in this heroic biopic. Good as far as it goes, but it pulls punches on what happened to Murrow after he took on Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (CBS sidelined Murrow because he was too overtly political.) Clooney wrote it, too.

A dramatization of the real-life interviews conducted by British talk-show host David Frost with disgraced former president Richard Nixon (see “All the President’s Men”). Frank Langella turns in a very credible Nixon. Fun fact: the role played by Oliver Platt in the film was played in real life by former BU Journalism professor Bob Zelnick.

STATE OF PLAY (2009)

Replacing Brad Pitt (who backed out), Russell Crowe plays an old-school Washington reporter covering the death of a congressional aide, with help from perky blogger Rachel McAdams, who tries to teach the old dog Crowe some new reporting tricks found on this thing called the Internet. Fun cameos of actual DC reporters, including Woodward.

SPOTLIGHT (2015)

Dir. Tom McCarthy. With help from screenwriter Josh Singer, McCarthy delivers an appreciative bouquet to traditional “accountability” journalism. Based on the true story of the Pulitzer-winning investigative reporting team at the Boston Globe who exposed the rampant sexual abuse and extensive cover-up within the Boston Catholic archdiocese.

* * * * * *

Honorable mention, TV series:

The Wire, Season 5

Newsroom

Lou Grant

Superman (George Reeves)

See a mild-mannered reporter at The Daily Planet, Clark Kent, turn into a righteous super hero. If only all reporters could be caped crusaders.

Honorable mention, documentaries:

Reporting America at War

Control Room

Around the World in 72 Days

Outfoxed

[For more info, see the website Image of Journalism in Popular Culture at USC]

As a service to my readers, I am posting this brief life of Tony Lukas, author of “Common Ground” and many other fine works of narrative non-fiction. I wrote this for American National Biography Online, a marvelous authoritative resource for information about prominent Americans.

Tony Lukas

Lukas, J. Anthony (25 Apr. 1933-5 June 1997), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, was born Jay Anthony Lukas in New York City to Edwin Jay Lukas, a prominent civil rights lawyer, and Elizabeth Schamberg, an actress. After his mother committed suicide, young Tony was sent to the Putney School, a progressive boarding school in southwestern Vermont. In 1951 he entered Harvard College, where he promptly joined the staff of the independent student-run newspaper the Harvard Crimson. One of his classmates and a fellow editor of the paper was David Halberstam. Lukas graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1955 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and pursued graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin. From 1956 to 1958 he served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Japan, where he wrote for the Voice of the United Nations Command.In 1959 he got a job at the Baltimore Sun covering the police beat for $105 a week. He quickly made his mark and took on a variety of assignments. Seeking a foreign assignment that the Sun could not provide, he joined the New York Times in 1962. He was once again on the same staff as Halberstam, and the two ambitious rivals crisscrossed the globe on assignment. Lukas served in the paper’s metro, Washington, and UN bureaus before going abroad and filing dispatches from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, Japan, Pakistan, South Africa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), and elsewhere. Eventually he joined the staff of the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Lukas won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1968 in the category of Local Investigative Specialized Reporting for a feature story he wrote for the Times about the life and murder of Linda Fitzpatrick, an affluent young woman caught up in the drug culture of New York City. Feeling out of touch with the youth of his own country after many years abroad, Lukas delved more deeply into Fitzpatrick’s story and widened the scope of his reporting to include a number of other young Americans. He later told their stories in a multiple biography titled Don’t Shoot–We Are Your Children! (1971).

During the same period, Lukas spent a year back in Cambridge as a Nieman fellow at Harvard. Returning to the Times, Lukas became a roving national correspondent based in Chicago. There, he plunged into covering the trial of the “Chicago Eight” (later reduced to the “Chicago Seven”)–political radicals accused of conspiring to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Making regular trips to the U.S. district court in Chicago, Lukas covered the trial from the fall of 1969 through the winter of 1970. During their five-month trial, the defendants cursed loudly and often in the courtroom. Since the Times style rules forbade the use of obscenities, Lukas littered his trial stories with the phrase “barnyard epithet” instead. That reporting resulted in The Barnyard Epithet and Other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (1970).

In the early 1970s Lukas dove into freelance assignments for major magazines, including the Atlantic, Columbia Journalism Review, Esquire, Harper’s, the Nation, and the New Republic. In 1971 he became a cofounder of MOREmagazine, which engaged in a critical examination of journalistic methods and ideals. The magazine, which was widely read by journalists, lasted seven years. Lukas also helped found the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provided free legal counsel for journalists, along with other services to the profession.

His next major project was an examination of the Watergate scandal. In April 1973 the New York Times Magazineasked Lukas to look into the abuses of power committed by President Richard Nixon. That assignment grew into the book Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years (1976). Consumed by the story and determined to write a coherent narrative of the notoriously opaque Watergate saga, Lukas produced a nearly six-hundred-page book that cemented his reputation as a deep researcher.

For several years Lukas held a series of positions that allowed him to continue to research and write books. In 1976-1977 he was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. The next year he was an adjunct professor at Boston University’s School of Public Communications. During 1977-1978 he took part in the Study Group on Urban School Desegregation sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge. He credited the group, especially the education scholar Diane Ravitch, with deepening his understanding of issues of equity in education. In 1978-1979 he had a Guggenheim Fellowship, and in 1979-1980 he was an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In 1982 he married Linda Healey, an editor at Pantheon Books.

Starting around 1978, Lukas began the research for a book about Boston’s response to court-ordered school desegregation, usually known as “the busing crisis.” The result was his masterpiece, Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (1985). Blending history, journalism, and sociology, Lukas created a braided narrative of three Boston families–one Yankee, one Irish, and one African American–to illuminate the forces that led to the federal court order to desegregate Boston public schools and the aftershocks of that ruling. Common Ground was hailed as a major work for its treatment of race and class in modern America, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1986 as well as the National Book Award and many other prizes.

Around this time Lukas began to suffer from depression. Still he continued to work. Lukas came out of the experience of writing the Boston book with a greater awareness of the role of class in American life. That interest drew him to a time in American history, the early twentieth century, when class warfare seemed plausible and perhaps imminent. The result was his final book, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America. A sprawling work of history and reportage, Big Trouble tells the story of the miners’ struggles in the West and the mysterious assassination of a former governor of Idaho.

On 5 June 1997, while he was in the late stages of completing Big Trouble, Lukas committed suicide in his apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. At the time of his death, he was president of the Authors Guild. Published posthumously, Big Trouble was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history in 1998. After his death, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize Project Awards were established in his honor. The prizes, awarded annually and co-administered by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, recognized excellence in nonfiction that addressed a political or social concern.

Tall, rumpled, and sad-eyed, J. Anthony Lukas was a tenacious reporter and researcher, known for conducting extensive interviews and accumulating mountains of facts. He was a reporter’s reporter, famous for his epic research. Throughout his career, Lukas elevated the standards of American journalism, both in his work with professional organizations and in his masterful demonstrations of narrative nonfiction.

BibliographyLukas’s papers–including manuscripts, letters, and subject files–were donated to the Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison. His reporting can be found in the online archives of the Harvard Crimson, the New York Times, and the many magazines he wrote for. Lukas was the subject of many interviews and profiles, notably a sketch by John McPhee in the New Yorker, 30 June 1975, and an alumni note in Harvard Magazine, Sept.-Oct. 1997, which includes a fond reminiscence by David Halberstam. A detailed assessment of Common Ground appeared in the Columbia Journalism Review, Jan. 2014. Lukas’s brother, Christopher, addressed his family’s history of suicide in his book Blue Genes (2008). Obituaries appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post, 7 June 1997, and a tribute appeared in the Baltimore Sun, 9 June 1997. Also helpful is a remembrance by the Washington Post book editor Jonathan Yardley in the Post on 9 June 1997.

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I’m still missing my friend and colleague David Carr, whose Media Equation column was usually my first citation in these blogposts. (I wonder what he’d be saying about Bill O’Reilly — and how much of that could get past the NYT copy desk.)

In my mind, one of the worst things O’Reilly has ever done was to say the following (which he has not disputed) to a NYTimes reporter who called him to get his side of the controversy, which is a fundamental principle of journalism:

‘I am coming after you with everything I have,’ Mr. O’Reilly said. ‘You can take it as a threat.’

Elsewhere in the NYTimes:

–Frank Bruni had a penetrating piece Sunday on the faults of the political press corps, especially the band of reporters who cover the presidential primaries. Having done a bit of that myself in 1987-88, 1992, and 1996, I can affirm that it’s not a pretty picture.

I agree with Bruni that the political press corps would do us all a favor if they would just stop covering Iowa and New Hampshire. That alone would elevate our national political life.

I would add this: most political reporters spend far too much time covering candidates and far too little time covering voters. Turn the lens around!

–Today’s Times brings news that the News Corp. is considering re-hiring Rebekah Brooks, the disgraced (but not convicted) former boss of Rupert Murdoch’s British empire. Raising the question (see O’Reilly above): If they like you, what does it take to get fired by the Murdoch/Ailes crew?

Further afield:

–On CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Brian Stelter continues to pull away from his predecessor by doing more reporting, by avoiding Washington-style bickering, and by providing a demonstration of good journalism in practice. To his credit, he has continued to report the O’Reilly story, not just milk it.

—The New Yorker is observing its 90th birthday, as only the brainchild of Harold Ross could. From the magazine’s troubled first year, here’s a piece titled “Why We Go to Cabarets: — an article that, according to a digressive story in the current issue by Sandy Frazier, saved the New Yorker‘s bacon by attracting the kind of young, fashionable readers that Ross was seeking. Fun fact: the 1925 Cabarets piece was written by Ellin Mackay, better known as Mrs. Irving Berlin.

Next up: I want to read the magazine’s story by A.J. Liebling about D-Day.

By one account, India’s Prime Minister, Narendi Modi, has drawn inspiration from the life story of Ben Franklin — colonial-era printer, proto-American journalist, and publishing success.

In a recent radio address in conjunction with President Obama’s visit to India, Modi hailed Franklin.

. . .your question is, who has inspired me. I liked reading as a child. And I got an opportunity to read the biography of Benjamin Franklin

“And I tell everyone, we should read Benjamin Franklin’s biography. Even today, it inspires me. And Benjamin Franklin had a multi-dimensional personality. He was a politician, he was a political scientist, he was a social worker, he was a diplomat. And he came from an ordinary family. He could not even complete his education. But till today, his thoughts have an impact on American life,” he added.

It is unclear (to me, at least) whether Modi is referring to Franklin’s famous “Autobiography” or to one of the many fine biographies of BF (although most of the best ones were written long after Modi’s childhood; my favorites are by Isaacson and Brands.) If it’s the “Autobiography,” then Modi is probably referring to young Ben’s ferocious program of self-improvement and his determination to rise from beyond-humble beginnings to make something of himself. Indeed, the circumstances of Ben’s early life in Boston, as the 15th child in his father’s large family, were those of deep poverty in a distant fragment of the British Empire. Yet, by the end of his long and remarkable life, Franklin was one of the most accomplished and celebrated figures on the planet.